the Complexion Connexion

One question lurking in the subconscious of the gadget cognoscenti is what will Nokia's and RIM's answers to iPhone be like? What will Nokia's & RIM's best efforts at the touchscreen produce?

If last year's HTC Touch being marketed by Sprint -- a telco in freefall -- is any example of iPhone-inspiration, then we are in for some funny-ass cellie punditry.

As Apple rolls out telco partnerships in Europe, iPhone's awesomeness is by now a matter of universal agreement and enters lore as a notch on the tech-timeline. Don't ask me. Edward Tufte, information design guru, characterized the iPhone's humane integration of hard- and soft-ware as a design leap. He called out the iPhone interface as newly, uniquely, devoid of "administrative debris".

Bold looks an attractive package. It's an iPhone with a Hasselblad-like leatherette back that will surely add a luxury feel and make the device easier to grasp.

Bold is an iPhone with a keyboard. This is odd, if hardly surprising. RIM figures Blackberry users must have that keyboard. After all, they are used to that keyboard. The Blackberry interface has been defined by that keyboard.

Ready for irony? That keyboard defeats the purpose of the touchscreen. That keyboard is nothing if not what Tufte called administrative debris. It is all administrative debris. Nothing but administrative debris.

That keyboard crowds out screen real estate to the extent that Bold must be wider and larger than the iPhone to achieve a touchscreen with some, any, utility. This makes Bold something of a hybrid: part touch experience with icons and part text-maniac's-best-friend. Which is to say, something that will not take anything away from the suits but which adds some of the sexy iPhone mojo that the suits would like to have along with the Microsoft Exchange Server access.

Enough mojo, perhaps, to keep the suits from migrating to iPhone. And that's the point: this is a defensive, stop-the-bleeding design strategy manifest as a clock-stopping hot pocket rocket.

It's all about the Individual v Enterprise market segmentation that is the landscape of the Blackberry v Apple Device War. Apple & iPhone own the house, and RIM & Blackberry own the glass-house. Tension will mount over the next few chapters as to who will penetrate the other's ... house.

RIM have that word 'innovation' on the Bold website, which is unfortunate. I'm reminded of the (excellent & entertaining) DirecTV commercials featuring the guy, a parody of a cable TV exec, in the marketing strategy board room who pretends to have an MBA, some pompous panaceae for killing DirecTV's market penetration and a few slick Kung Fu moves. Cameo by Ed Begley, Jr ...

We'll need to demo Bold to find out if its hybridity is ridiculously contrived or makes some sense for users already accustomed to Blackberry and, more importantly for RIM, for individual users who are native to the iPhone wheel-house.

Larry coined it -- "iPhone Envy". It's the feelings Windows Mobile and Blackberry (the people responsible for those brands) have in regard to the innovative iPhone Experience.

All smartfone brands are converging on The iPhone Experience, which I keep saying in Tufte's way, is devoid of administrative debris. That's a pretty high hurdle, as we shall come to find out, for the sucky interface designers at the leading software and hardware companies who are trapped in the legacy features of their past products and in the soggy, undemanding design cultures of their corporations.

HTC Touch (a lame device Sprint is marketing ... lame because it runs Windows-sucky-Mobile) is one of the mee-too iPhones.

Blackberry's Bold is RIM's defensive attempt to keep Crackberry addicts in the glass house from migrating to Apple's opium den next door. I mean, an iPhone with less screen and full of text keys is simply a Blackberry with iPhone characteristics (I'm thinking of the Chinese bureaucrats who said, in effect, 'we seek a centralized system with capitalist characteristics' -- or some hilariously fudged nonsequitur like that).

Now Microsoft, according to its usual lame PR playbook, is trying to rally its mobile partners with a pep talk designed & timed to usurp at least some mojo from Apple's 3G iPhone marketing ramp.

Conclusions. I have none yet. Unfortunately for the truly innovative, customers are pretty dumb and after a while tend to be unaware of the real original. Look at how many Original Ray's Pizza venues there are in New York City. You can tell the real original: it doesn't say "original".

Apple's iPhone -- the Original iPhone!

Is there any more proof than that provided by this current Pied-Piper scenario that money -- especially in committees -- makes you stupid? Why has Andy Lees not evidently read the Cluetrain?

Finn, Hodding's sister, writes that Hodding Carter (IV), that's Finn's brother, will be interviewed on NPR this morning and it will air at 6:51 and again at 8:51 and, if we're lucky, again at 10:51 US EST (Eastern Standard Time).

Tune in to your local NPR station. Or listen on the Web (click the "Listen Now" link and hear Hodding chatting with NPR's Steve Inskeep for Morning Edition -- 6'47" ).

His new book, Off the Deep End, is about this 45-year old, ex-collegiate swimmer's bid to qualify for the 2008 Olympics.

Without having read it, I can say it sounds even more Plimpton-esque than his previous books: one about building a Viking knorr, assembling a crew of characters and retracing Leif Eriksson's sea-path from Greenland to the fabled "Vinland" (somewhere in Nova Scotia, I personally believe Vinland was actually Brooklyn -- there is simply no alternative explanation for Flatbush Avenue, Coney Island and Junior's Cheesecake); the other about retracing Lewis & Clark's river-path to the Northwest Passage (this has quite hilarious segments depicting Hodding, himself, and his side-kick, Preston, discovering mosquitoes and garbage on the Missouri River; Lewis & Clark will have had the one but not the other -- apart from deer poop).

There are a few others in the H Carter IV catalogue, one about the history of plumbing (a scatological indulgence) and another about the blight of the Florida Everglades (too far gone). While they too are about water or, specifically, about Hodding in water they are comparative placeholders in the auto-documentation of Hodding's life aquatic.

I anticipate this one about swimming is closer to the bone, even if the author is today still in Maine and not in Beijing with the rest of the U.S.A. Swim Team; perhaps because so.

Tune in today or later run the audio. Hodding is a funny, self-effacing very good read. Despite appearance, his scope of subjects is wider than himself and water, though he might not admit it.

Stew, creator & MC of this year's Broadway hit, Passing Strange, says some heavy truthes about the importance of art ... and American rejection of it.

There's a Pfizer commercial embedded at the beginning, which will be the death of us all, and kind of makes Stew's point ... but the content is worth it.

Says Stew ...

What America is lacking is the understanding that art is important [he's not talking about collecting old art, folks; he's talking about making it] ... To admit that art is important is to admit that critique, that inherent critique of society that art always is. And I don't think that America wants to deal with that critique.

We don't take art seriously and I think it's a very serious reason why we don't take art seriously.

I think a lot of Americans don't like -- what -- art -- does. Maybe we're also not equipped to deal with it.

From the demo, it looks like Google's smartphone platform, Android, involves some new user-interface touches and totally new technology (Compass Mode) that will make it a strong competitor to iPhone.

We'll see if iPhone 3G has enough to preserve some distance.

I noted in particular that Android uses the WebKit browser engine (read Safari, iPhone) so Google is not reinventing the wheel here and this mobile browser-rendering experience will likely match the iPhone's. Important, given iPhone's 5.5 million installed base which may grow by another 10 million this year.

Among other even senior points, Dave picks out the "... reject and denounce ..." moment to spotlight Obama's mental agility & flexibility ... which I find amusing as well as illuminating.

Advance to the 5'50" spot where Obama responds to the semantic kerfuffle Hillary digs herself into with Russert's unintentional assistance.

Dave's chief point, which I first saw being discussed on Bill Moyers program after Obama's victory was sealed, is that Barak Obama is redefining democracy. It's not just about using the Internet for fund-raising but about how he's internalized the lessons he learned as a community organizer and mashed them up with what the Internet teaches us about knowledge-sharing and collaboration.

The following is a reprint of an op-ed piece by Mark Rogers, Communications Director of Cape Wind, the private-sector organization presently proposing the first off-shore wind-farm in the United States on Horseshoe Shoal in the Nantucket Sound south of Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

The United States can increase its use of wind power over the next two
decades to supply twenty percent of the nation’s electricity without
any technological breakthroughs, according to a first-of-its-kind
report issued by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) last month.

The report entitled, "20% Wind Energy by 2030" [PDF, link not provided in the original -ed.], forecasts that target can
be met with 300 gigawatts of installed wind power in the United States
assuming that electric demand also increases by 39 percent.

According to the report, the DOE expects coastal states to harness
50,000 megawatts of offshore wind in shallow water depths of less than
100 feet. The report notes for some coastal states (like
Massachusetts) shallow water offshore wind can provide 100 percent of
the electricity supply.

The DOE further states that increasing the use of wind power to supply
20 percent of the nation’s electricity would reduce carbon dioxide
emissions (that contribute to climate change) from the electricity
generation sector by 25 percent while creating up to a half million new
American jobs.

This increased use of wind power would allow the U.S. to reduce its use
of natural gas by 50 percent and its use of coal by 18 percent to
generate electricity, according to the DOE, and this would improve
energy independence and national security. The report notes that
without this increased use of wind power the U.S. would substantially
increase its use of natural gas for electricity generation, with heavy
reliance upon imported liquid natural gas (the greatest suppliers of
which will be Iran, Qatar and Russia).

Finally, the DOE notes that increased use of wind
power will benefit Americans by making the price of the energy more
stable and less vulnerable to the price volatility seen from fossil
fuels. While the cost of building all new forms of
electrical generation including wind power has increased considerably,
at least the fuel cost of wind will always be stable, at zero.

Locally, some have argued that we should put aside shallow water
offshore wind projects and instead wait for deepwater projects.
The U.S. Department of Energy takes a very different view in its new
report:

“Shallow water wind
turbine projects have been proposed and could be followed by
transitional and finally deepwater turbines. These paths should not be
considered as mutually exclusive choices. Because there is a high
degree of interdependence among them, they should be considered a
sequence of development that builds from a shallow water foundation of
experience and knowledge to the complexities of deeper water.”

We at Cape Wind were pleased recently to see that over 41,000 (of the
42,000) written comments received by the Minerals Management Service on
their Environmental Impact Statement were in support of our project
moving forward. While we recognize that in this day in age that
any energy infrastructure project will face opposition, we note that
two recent independent polls found statewide support for Cape Wind at
86 percent and that support on the Cape and Islands is growing.

We hope to complete permitting by the end of this year, and we look
forward to one day providing 75 percent of the electricity needs of the
Cape and Islands from the clean and inexhaustible winds on Horseshoe
Shoal.

As America’s first offshore wind farm, Cape Wind would help make
Massachusetts a global leader in offshore renewable energy while also
helping the United States move toward the goal of supplying 20 percent
of its electricity from the power of wind.

John McCain is a good guy. But he looks ridiculous on script, as the YouTube of his, yesterday's, June 3rd general election opener in Kenner (New Orleans) Louisianna shows.

McCain, as a naval aviator Vietnam War hero & POW, has a few solids going for him. He's not much of a bullshit artist in the Senate, a fairly straight-talker who's word is not bad, as these things go. He's got a temper and he's a little bit disorganized. And he has no chance before this race even begins.

1. John McCain is Too Old

There's nothing to add here. Age isn't especially a problem, except his opponent, being exceptionally virile, makes him look anemic.

2. John McCain is a Bad Speaker

The event in New Orleans above highlights that John McCain is a terrible public speaker and that he is worse than innept when reading the teleprompter ...

"And my friends, good evening [wild hoots from a single female in what seems to reverberate like an empty hall | pause | unbelievably fake smile] from ... the ...great ... city of [looks down, checks notes] ... New Orleans."

Later at 2' 05" comes another howler ...

"... but the choice is between the right change and the wrong change, between going forward and going backward [insincere smile]."

The Hillary Faithful -- which group apparently includes red-neck women as well as "OWW" (older white women) and even quite a few educated women (including my wife) who are not in a position to see the Obama | Clinton battle through any but the frame of gender -- are faced now with their anger.

In time, as their anger subsides, they will be faced with the choice of voting for the old man with the pro-life legislative record which he has promised to uphold and continue, or the young man with the pro-choice position. These women will either vote for the pro-choice candidate or not vote.

That's why I see Obama taking an historic 80% landslide in the general election. Come November, most of the Hillary Faithful will rather stay home than vote.

4. John McCain looks and is Pale

In the purely symbolic terms of visuals, John McCain's short arms and odd hand-gestures (though earned via debilitating torture during the Vietnam War, not all voters will understand this), square physique and too-white complexion compare meakly against Obama's rangey, long-necked charisma.

In terms of quality-of-the-man, McCain looks palid against Obama, who's intelligence permits his policy statements to remain simple and user-centered while having a remarkable internal consistency when examined closely for integrity and common sense in the context of his powerful & hopeful vision.

McCain, in contrast, like many conservatives and Republicans (since the death of Wm F Buckley, these are two distinct groups of people) doesn't seem to have thought through the issues as if he has a stake in them.

5. John McCain thinks we should be One-Hundred-Years-in-Iraq

No matter what happens in the general champaign, no one will ever forget that McCain's position on Iraq was painted as '100 years ... whatever it takes.' Despite what he actually said, John McCain will never succeed in untarring himself from the echos of that perception.

6. Isolation

The Obama | Clinton battle in the primary means that Barak Obama and his champaign staff are honed, hardened and fresh off the gruelling American road, where they've had face-to-face encounters with millions of real people. John McCain has not been traveling and will never successfully imagine his way into the personal situations of these Americans and this will result in his sounding wooden and insincere when he talks about change and about his policies.

Add to this that the steely undercarriage of the traditional Republican philosophy is that the poor are on their own, and you have a Presidential candidate who will fail repeatedly, and often humorously, to connect.

For these six reasons, I predict that John McCain will be fortunate to capture 20% of the vote in the November presidential election. Contrasting against a few appealing qualities, his candidacy looks old, pale, weak, lame and out of touch up against Barak Obama, who succeeds above all in looking Presidential.